The mobile communicant market continues to require creation of new services through recombination or integration of the existing technologies. Current development of communication and broadcast technologies has allowed conventional broadcasting systems and mobile communication systems to provide advertising services through portable terminals (or mobile terminals), such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
Due to latent and actual market needs and increasing user demands for multimedia services, service providers' intended strategies for providing new services such as advertising services in addition to the existing voice service and data service, and the identified interests of Information Technology (IT) companies which are bolstering their mobile communication businesses to meet the user's demands, convergence of mobile communication service and Internet Protocol (IP) has become a priority in the development of next generation mobile communication technologies.
Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a group for studying the standard for interoperability between individual mobile solutions, serves to define various application standards for mobile games, Internet services and the like. Of the OMA Working Groups, Open Mobile Alliance Requirement (OMA REQ) Working Group and Open Mobile Alliance Content Delivery (OMA CD) Working Group are researching on the technology standard for offering Mobile Advertising (MobAd) service.
The mobile terminal transmits its preference to an advertising server via an advertising engine when subscribing to an advertising service or requesting an advertisement, so that a personalized advertisement may be provided through a mobile advertising system based on the mobile advertising service technology. Then the advertising server selects an advertisement satisfying the user's preference information from the advertisements received from an advertiser and delivers it to the advertising engine, thereby providing a personalized advertising service to the user. In the conventional mobile advertising service, since the preference that the user provides to receive a personalized advertisement is personal information specific to a particular user, it is strictly limited for other users to use this information. For example, even though a particular user desires to deliver the requested personalized advertisement to group members or other users, like when one of IPod (a mobile multimedia player designed and launched by Apple) club members intends to allow other members to receive the advertisement he has received, the respective group members cannot use the preference information of the particular user and should provide the preference including the same information to the advertising server independently. Then the advertising server delivers advertisements to the users referring to the received preference information of the respective users. Therefore, there is a need for a preference sharing method in which an advertising server can provide the same personalized advertising service as that of a particular user to group members or other users based on the preference set by the particular user.